List of applications installed on a iPhone, via the iPhone itself or iTunes

Question

Is it possible to get a list of all installed applications from an iPhone itself? I have read myths of people accessing the internal iTunes data, getting the list of installed apps that way.

1/ A app installed on the iPhone itself and is able to report all installed apps to an external website.

2/ A desktop application that would parse the iTunes data and gather the required information before posting it to an external website.

Anyone have any (A) experience on either of the above or (B) better ideas on how one would go about gathering the App Store name of an application installed on a iPhone.

Answer 1

It is not possible to get a complete list of applications that are installed on the iPhone from the iPhone itself, unless you work on a jailbroken iPhone. You can test for some applications by testing whether there's an application that responds to a particular URL scheme (using UIApplication's canOpenURL method)

A desktop application can do this by reading the data itself. However, it is not programmatically supported, so you're on your own there.